Every single person who spends their days and nights at the Adams County Jail has a story, but they all share one thing in common — the inmates are all humans.

Fortunately the leaders at the Adams County Sheriff’s Office understand that all inmates are not created equally.

All too often in our culture it’s popular for some people to just take a downright awful approach to our fellow men and women.

“Lock ’em up and throw away the key.”

“They don’t deserve to live.”

And it’s true that a certain segment of criminals may never be anything but a criminal threat to society.

But a much larger segment of the area’s inmate population are just people who for whatever reason made some big mistakes, took a wrong turn and wound up behind bars.

And unfortunately, those people wear a stigma from their criminal history.

If the rest of society lumps them together with the truly depraved criminals, the ones who blatantly take lives without remorse, for example, we’re doing a disservice to those human beings and to our community.

Without a little help many of those people, who if not for the sake of a bad decision or two, would be good, productive members of society can quickly get into a revolving cycle of crime. They can start believing the society around them that looks down upon them and view crime as their only option.

The Adams County Sheriff’s Office has recently begun working to change that for some inmates by forming job fairs and offering workplace skills testing for inmates.

Both are great ideas for improving the confidence an inmate has in himself as well as showing them that they have the skills to stand on their own, apart from crime.

We applaud the sheriff’s office and others for seeing this need and addressing it.